Welcome to Blackboard
Starting today, faculty, students, and staff will notice a few changes when they log in to OAK. Vanderbilt has migrated its course management system, powered by Blackboard but known locally as OAK (Online Access to Knowledge), from Vanderbilt servers to Blackboard servers as part of an effort to improve performance and reliability.
Important Changes:
- We are retiring the name OAK. We will refer to Vanderbilt’s course management system as Blackboard to more accurately describe both the system and the servers it runs on.
- Vanderbilt has published a new copyright policy for Blackboard. Please take a few minutes to read through this policy before posting content to Blackboard.
- To access your courses on Blackboard, visit blackboard.vanderbilt.edu. You will need your VUNet-ID and E-Password to log in.
Course Availability:
- When you log in, you should see all your courses from Fall 2013 to present, with some exceptions.
- Fall 2014 courses won’t be available in Blackboard until December 29th. We waited until after fall grades were due in most schools to move these courses, so they are on a delayed schedule.
- Courses that were over 1GB in size prior to migration are also on a delayed migration schedule. Most of these courses should be available in Blackboard by the 29th. Fall 2014 courses over 1GB will take another week or two.
- You won’t see courses older than Fall 2013 in Blackboard. As you may recall, courses older than Fall 2013 were inactivated in OAK earlier this fall as part of efforts to improve performance. Some of these older courses were reactivated upon faculty request, and these reactivated courses will be available in Blackboard on December 29th. Other pre-Fall 2013 courses are not planned for migration.
- Non-courses (e.g., OAK groups created for faculty search committees, OAK groups created for student organizations) have been migrated and should be available in Blackboard.
Please note: Some courses and organizations that were available to students on OAK were made unavailable to students during the migration. Instructors and organization leaders should check the availability of their courses and organizations. To do so, enter the course or organization, click on Customization in the Control Panel, click on Properties, and look for the Set Availability option. Select Yes and click Submit to make the course or organization available to students.
Faculty preparing for spring courses: If you need access to an older course not currently available in Blackboard, please email blackboard@vanderbilt.edu and ask for that course to be migrated. Please allow 24 hours for the migration of a particular course.
All Blackboard users: If you have questions about the availability of a specific course in Blackboard or more general questions about the transition from OAK to Blackboard, please email blackboard@vanderbilt.edu. Staff from the VUIT Blackboard Transition Support Team are monitoring this email and will respond within 24 hours.
More information: For the latest news about Blackboard, visit my.vanderbilt.edu/blackboard. This blog is maintained by the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, which is now managing Blackboard at Vanderbilt.
Additional information about Blackboard can be found at www.vanderbilt.edu/blackboard. Please note that pages on this site that refer to OAK may be out of date. These pages will be updated in the coming weeks.